NASA’s next Mars rover to prep for sample returns, human exploration

Set to launch in 2020, it will look for past life and collect souvenirs.

NASA affirmed its addiction to Big Red this week, announcing plans for the next Mars rover, which is scheduled to launch in 2020. The mission plan is conservative in a way, mainly hitting items on the Martian to-do list that had previously been neglected due to funding issues. If you were amazed by the novelty of Curiosity, prepare to be amazed by the exact same thing again. Rather than reinvent the rover, NASA will save money and reduce the risk of the unknown by building a modified Curiosity-class vessel.

The mission will have three main goals. First, the rover will be specifically outfitted to look for signs of past life in the rocks of Mars—a job at the limits of Curiosity’s abilities. Unlike Curiosity, it will also be collecting rock samples that will hopefully be brought back to Earth by later parcel delivery missions. Finally, it will be doing a little scouting on the side to start paving the way for a future human expedition.

To look for evidence that life once existed on Mars, the rover will use instruments similar in nature to the ones Curiosity is carrying around, but with some key differences. It will need to be able to inspect the structure and chemistry of rocks on a smaller scale as it will be looking for fossils or trace chemical signatures associated with microbial-type life. There will also be slightly more capable instruments for organic chemistry that will refrain from crushing samples for analysis (since NASA is aiming to bring some of those babies home).

The new rover will have to do the same kind of work Curiosity is doing in order to identify rocks with the best prospects of yielding evidence of past life. Its controllers will be looking for rocks that were deposited in the presence of water, where chemistry could have provided the energy for life and where some organic matter could be preserved. Ensuring that all of these are options will undoubtedly create a healthy discussion about where on Mars to drop the rover for its mission.

The sample collection system will load thirty or so small cores of rock into a container that would protect and preserve them. The plan is for that container to be dropped off somewhere for a to-be-designed, two-stage retrieval mission. The first piece would land on the surface, grab the container, and launch it into Martian orbit. The second component would snatch it from orbit and fly it back to Earth. The details haven’t been worked out yet, but NASA will have to know enough about that system to send a container that will be compatible with it.

If this all sounds familiar, it could be because it’s essentially the same mission that was scrapped in 2011 due to budget limitations.

A new component to this mission, however, is gathering information relevant to future human exploration of the Red Planet, currently targeted for the 2030s. The rover should gather lots of environmental data, including continuous weather conditions and measurements of potentially harmful cosmic rays, as well as characterize the risks posed by Mars’ ubiquitous dust. It will also test technology to use CO2 from the Martian atmosphere to generate oxygen. If oxygen could be produced there for life support systems and rocket fuel, the astronaut-bearing spacecraft could cut a lot of weight, which is always at an absolute premium.

The mission also figures to include a significant upgrade to the ridiculously awesome SkyCrane landing system. NASA will want a much tighter “landing ellipse”—the margin of error around the targeted landing location—which they hope to achieve by improving the SkyCrane system’s ability to recognize surface terrain. It would then be able to make adjustments on the way down to ensure it sets down in just the right spot.

Of course, 2020 is a way off yet, and we’ll have to wait and see what makes the cut and which instruments are chosen to fulfill the mission’s goals. But budgets willing, NASA will introduce a new member of the Mars family.

50 Reader Comments

Please put a microscope on the rover! Find some wet sand or water/frost just under the surface, and stick it under the microscope at >0C temperature and see if you spot microbial life. Let's settle this once and for all.

I'm still shocked that skycrane worked without fault. I mean, it seems a lot more appropriate than just slamming things into the surface covered in airbags and hope it lands on the right side but man the fact that NASA developed a hovering rocket platform to scout terrain and then gently lower a rover the size (and weight!) of a car onto the surface and to be able to make the entire reentry and landing phases completely automated is just incredible. Imagine what they could do if they weren't constantly having funds pulled and weren't tethered to horrific contracts handpicked by greedy Senators.

I'm still shocked that skycrane worked without fault. I mean, it seems a lot more appropriate than just slamming things into the surface covered in airbags and hope it lands on the right side but man the fact that NASA developed a hovering rocket platform to scout terrain and then gently lower a rover the size (and weight!) of a car onto the surface and to be able to make the entire reentry and landing phases completely automated is just incredible. Imagine what they could do if they weren't constantly having funds pulled and weren't tethered to horrific contracts handpicked by greedy Senators.

Yeah. They could do incredible things without politico interference... like land on the Moon! There's no limit to what humans can do when the smartest brains are brought together and are given necessary resources and are left alone to do their thing.

I think you are right. I think SpaceX is the predecessor to "The Company" from the Aliens movie franchise. They, not Chinese or whoever, are going to be leading the next charge to space. And they are doing it so cheaply safely and easily. It's incredible. Too bad SpaceX is in Los Angeles area (uuuugh!) or I would so apply there in a nanosecond.

This era of space exploration is getting more and more exciting. We have cameras orbiting and on Mars, detailing so much data that we're understanding this once mysterious planet more than our own oceans. We have one of the Voyagers on it's way out of the solar system, detailing phenomena that no one anticipated, and probes that in the next few years will detail both Pluto and Ceres, our 2 biggest Dwarf Planets.

I think the cream of the crop for me will be the day we decide to punch through Europa and see what's under that shell.

This era of space exploration is getting more and more exciting. We have cameras orbiting and on Mars, detailing so much data that we're understanding this once mysterious planet more than our own oceans. We have one of the Voyagers on it's way out of the solar system, detailing phenomena that no one anticipated, and probes that in the next few years will detail both Pluto and Ceres, our 2 biggest Dwarf Planets.

I think the cream of the crop for me will be the day we decide to punch through Europa and see what's under that shell.

I'm still shocked that skycrane worked without fault. I mean, it seems a lot more appropriate than just slamming things into the surface covered in airbags and hope it lands on the right side but man the fact that NASA developed a hovering rocket platform to scout terrain and then gently lower a rover the size (and weight!) of a car onto the surface and to be able to make the entire reentry and landing phases completely automated is just incredible. Imagine what they could do if they weren't constantly having funds pulled and weren't tethered to horrific contracts handpicked by greedy Senators.

A common misconception (one I held myself due to not paying super-close detail to the MER missions and watching the less-horrible Mars movie Red Planet) is that the MERs really were just tossed onto Mars with nothing but airbags to break their fall.

The MER EDL actually went like this: The EDL module with detached from the spacecraft, it used an ablative heat shield to aero-brake, then a super-sonic parachute deployed and slowed it down further, then the heat shield was detached, and the inner module containing the rover and a number of rockets detached and used powered flight to further slow down until it was nearly to the ground and hovering. Then the rockets turned off and the airbags deployed and it dropped the last few meters. This of course all had to be completely automated because of the light-speed delay to Mars.

You may recognize this as being exactly what you saw in the Seven Minutes of Terror video minus the last part.

Literally two things were different about Curiosity's descent (in the big picture):1) During the aero-braking phase, the vessel was capable of limited aerodynamic flight and steered itself downrange. This is the #1 thing that allowed them to put Curiosity so precisely near the center of their landing ellipse.

2) The cable system that lowered curiosity to the ground, once the craft was already hovering on rockets near the ground. The only reason to do this was because Curiosity was too heavy, otherwise "slamming things into the surface" (from 20 feet up) would be just dandy.

It still is an amazing achievement, that's for sure, and is a great proof of concept for future missions of similar mass. But a lot of the parts of EDL that seemed complicated and risky were already tested successfully in previous missions.

Please put a microscope on the rover! Find some wet sand or water/frost just under the surface, and stick it under the microscope at >0C temperature and see if you spot microbial life. Let's settle this once and for all.

Curiosity already has a microscope. It's called MAHLI and has a max resolution of 15 um/pixel. That's pretty close to being able to see a wide variety of (earth) bacteria.

Except if you scooped up some moist soil on earth, where you know for a fact that there's billions of bacteria, you wouldn't see any when you slapped it on your slide. You'd just see dirt. There's a reason that bacteria in labs are grown in transparent petri dishes in transparent media. Because otherwise it's hard to see them. Sample preparation is a big deal, and designed a robotic facility to do this sounds... challenging.

Not that the idea is fundamentally flawed! Just lets not jump the gun, let NASA figure out what capabilities make the most sense. After all, it's not like scooping up some soil with water bound in it and not finding a living microbe would actually settle the question. I don't think we need to hurry. Let's go slow -- we're still figuring out if it's even possible that Mars could have had microbial life in the distant past.

Actually, a significant point is that the Curiosity sky-crane did not scout the terrain. Its sensors were nothing more than rangefinders to determine altitude, and everything was tied to that. Amazing as it was, the Curiosity EDL was a very simple process with little computation involved. It went so well because it had been worked out beforehand in painstaking detail - almost all of the offset from the center of the target ellipse was due to a small error at the point of atmospheric insertion.

Modifying this to produce a package capable of determining terrain in real-time and adjusting thrust as needed to set down on the best spot is a very significant upgrade - it may look like the same sort of sky-crane, but there'll be a lot more going on.

As much as I love all things Space and Exploration, and being involved in non-space exploration related software development I fully understand the need for rigor and pace, but NASA really has chosen the slow road of extreme risk aversion and plodding mission choices.

No wonder SpaceX and others are sidestepping them to do things on their own - and hoping to make a buck from NASA by leasing their capabilities.

Real exploration in the very near future - 2020? - will be the same way as done in 1492. Private Corporations will be formed to "attempt a feat" and hire it our to the most technically savvy team they can afford. NASA, sadly, will not be that team.

I'm still shocked that skycrane worked without fault. I mean, it seems a lot more appropriate than just slamming things into the surface covered in airbags and hope it lands on the right side but man the fact that NASA developed a hovering rocket platform to scout terrain and then gently lower a rover the size (and weight!) of a car onto the surface and to be able to make the entire reentry and landing phases completely automated is just incredible. Imagine what they could do if they weren't constantly having funds pulled and weren't tethered to horrific contracts handpicked by greedy Senators.

I totally agree, amazing engineering, and not to deminish what NASA had done (not trying to be an armchair expert) but Mars gravity is only 38% of Earth's, so not exactly the "weight" of a car...but really awesome to say the least.

I'm still shocked that skycrane worked without fault. I mean, it seems a lot more appropriate than just slamming things into the surface covered in airbags and hope it lands on the right side...

FYI the airbag system was design in such a way that no matter the orientation at landing it would unfold with the rover upright. They didn't have to hope for it to land on the right side, the engineered it to upright itself.

I think you are right. I think SpaceX is the predecessor to "The Company" from the Aliens movie franchise. They, not Chinese or whoever, are going to be leading the next charge to space. And they are doing it so cheaply safely and easily. It's incredible. Too bad SpaceX is in Los Angeles area (uuuugh!) or I would so apply there in a nanosecond.

Edit: can't type I.

If you're a rocket engineer/scientist, they have a launch/test site in McGregor Texas. No pollution, no nightlife and no snow. Temps in F triple digits. Trust me I know!

The sad but true hidden history here is why previous missions, including Curiosity, have never included the right experiments to look specifically for life on Mars. It's scientific conservatism, pure and simple. Scientists have been trying to get decent equipment on Mars missions to look for life for decades, and they have been repeatedly shot down because, well, "extraterrestrial life" is just too out there for many old-school scientists, even though with an open mind, we all know we need to look.

I think there was a political aspect too: experiments looking for extraterrestrial life are a bulls-eye target for moron legislators looking for a target to make fun of in the press. "No taxpayer money for pie-in-the-sky little-green-man research!" has too tempting a ring to it.

It's really sad it's taken this long for the stick-in-the-muds to die off enough that a new generation can get this stuff into the mission. How many missions have we sent now without this kind of obvious instrumentation?

This kind of thing is another demonstration that one of the most important principles of science often gets overlooked by bad scientists when it suits their prejudices: "An absence of evidence is not evidence of absence". The thinking seemed to run: we have no evidence of life on Mars (because we haven't really looked hard), so it probably isn't there, so it's a waste of money looking for it.

Unfortunately, scientists are people too. In the long term the process works, but geez it can be frustrating in the "short term" (half a century in this case).

I'm still shocked that skycrane worked without fault. I mean, it seems a lot more appropriate than just slamming things into the surface covered in airbags and hope it lands on the right side but man the fact that NASA developed a hovering rocket platform to scout terrain and then gently lower a rover the size (and weight!) of a car onto the surface and to be able to make the entire reentry and landing phases completely automated is just incredible. Imagine what they could do if they weren't constantly having funds pulled and weren't tethered to horrific contracts handpicked by greedy Senators.

Yeah. They could do incredible things without politico interference... like land on the Moon! There's no limit to what humans can do when the smartest brains are brought together and are given necessary resources and are left alone to do their thing.

Uh, we went to the Moon because of politico interference. There wasn't a scientific case to go, it was political, pure and simple. Was it a scientist that thought it up and pushed it and found the funds for it and supported it? Nope, it was JFK, prompted by Sputnik. Which also came into being because of cold-war politics.

I love science but if I have to feed my kids before I buy a new camero why shouldn't the govt have the same rules? You really think this is more important than infrastructure and renewable energy for our survival? This is your money they are spending on making aerospace corps rich. How about no mars missions and scholarships instead? Wouldn't that help the country more? America seems to have all kinds of extra money when big corporations are the recipient. Just not the taxpayers.

Wait... If they're developing tech to convert CO2 in the atmosphere to O2, they should deploy it on Earth first before we destroy ourselves.

(Maybe I'm missing the invisible sarcasm tags but...) Converting CO2 to O2 is something we already know how to do. The problem is that it costs energy, and where are we going to get that energy? If it's fossil fuels then that's guaranteed to be a net loss. If we had enough renewable energy to power enough converters to make a dent in CO2, then we would instead just be using that energy to power everything that we do with fossil fuels today. Maybe once that happens and emissions are no longer a concern we can work on actually reducing atmospheric CO2 artificially, but until then...

Whatever energy source we send to Mars to power the CO2 to O2 converter, the cost of making it will have been paid on earth.

I love science but if I have to feed my kids before I buy a new camero why shouldn't the govt have the same rules? You really think this is more important than infrastructure and renewable energy for our survival?

If a Camero was a tiny fraction of the cost of a Big Mac then that would change things, wouldn't it? There'd be no reason not to stop by the Chevy dealership on your way to McDonald's.

The cost of a project like this is a fart in the wind next to the cost of re-building our nations infrastructure or converting everything to renewable energy.

We're a big country, despite claims of doom we still have a lot of wealth, NASA's budget is tiny, and we can afford to do more than one thing at a time. Having priorities is great, but "priority" does not and should not mean "done to the exclusion of all else".

I'm still shocked that skycrane worked without fault. I mean, it seems a lot more appropriate than just slamming things into the surface covered in airbags and hope it lands on the right side but man the fact that NASA developed a hovering rocket platform to scout terrain and then gently lower a rover the size (and weight!) of a car onto the surface and to be able to make the entire reentry and landing phases completely automated is just incredible. Imagine what they could do if they weren't constantly having funds pulled and weren't tethered to horrific contracts handpicked by greedy Senators.

Yeah. They could do incredible things without politico interference... like land on the Moon! There's no limit to what humans can do when the smartest brains are brought together and are given necessary resources and are left alone to do their thing.

Uh, we went to the Moon because of politico interference. There wasn't a scientific case to go, it was political, pure and simple. Was it a scientist that thought it up and pushed it and found the funds for it and supported it? Nope, it was JFK, prompted by Sputnik. Which also came into being because of cold-war politics.

For cryin' out loud there's always one of you in a web forum.

Do you honestly think that I don't know about Kennedy and his promise to land on the Moon, or how the entire space program started in the first place? Honestly? Tell me? Do you really think so? No you don't!

NASA was told what the end goal should be, and then they were left alone to completion. That's not interference.

Today the politicians are changing the NASA mission every few years in order to score political points. That's what I meant by interference, and you know it.

NASA was told what the end goal should be, and then they were left alone to completion. That's not interference.

Don't make me laugh. While NASA was significantly empowered by Kenedy's promise, their managers still spent a lot of effort steering the program through a variety of political minefields. Do yourself a favour and read up on it - even something as critical (and technical) as the LOR decision only got through by appealing to the President.

it's been said before and it'll be said again: based on the roughly $1 trillion (give or take, in today's dollars) it would take to successfully "put a man on the mars", the whole endeavor continues to sound lovely but would be nearly impossible to pull off in the real world. why? a sample:

(1) it would be nearly impossible to coordinate the massive intergovernmental/corporate combined effort that would be necessary due to the extraordinary cost.

(2) it will be nearly impossible to convince politicians/electorates that spending $1 trillion+ on such a project is worth it, especially when the effects of global warming will have seriously hampered overall global GDP growth leading up to 2030.

and the list goes on.

this is obviously tangential to the main point of the article, but the article does mention setting the stage for human exploration, and, IMHO, responsible reporting on proposed human exploration of mars needs to include at least some brief discussion of the faults of such a loony idea.

It's really sad it's taken this long for the stick-in-the-muds to die off enough that a new generation can get this stuff into the mission. How many missions have we sent now without this kind of obvious instrumentation?

I think you are being a bit unfair. In the 70's, Viking was pretty explicitly looking for life, so it's hard to conclude that the 'older generation' is at fault. The problem was, viking kind of sort of found life. One of the experiments had a positive result, but nothing else did. The result was confusing and scientists quickly realised that what with it being another planet and all, they actually didn't have a very good idea of how to go about looking for life unless is was something really obvious. So, the last few decades have sort of been dedicated to trying to get either a good enough grounding in the fundamentals of how Mars works to be able to design a good experiment for life, or else to get a big enough budget to send a giant swiss army knife of science to brute force it by doing All The Experiments. Thus far, we haven't managed either. So the search continues. It's a hard problem.

It's really sad it's taken this long for the stick-in-the-muds to die off enough that a new generation can get this stuff into the mission. How many missions have we sent now without this kind of obvious instrumentation?

I think you are being a bit unfair. In the 70's, Viking was pretty explicitly looking for life, so it's hard to conclude that the 'older generation' is at fault. The problem was, viking kind of sort of found life. One of the experiments had a positive result, but nothing else did. The result was confusing and scientists quickly realised that what with it being another planet and all, they actually didn't have a very good idea of how to go about looking for life unless is was something really obvious. So, the last few decades have sort of been dedicated to trying to get either a good enough grounding in the fundamentals of how Mars works to be able to design a good experiment for life, or else to get a big enough budget to send a giant swiss army knife of science to brute force it by doing All The Experiments. Thus far, we haven't managed either. So the search continues. It's a hard problem.

I agree completely. I also want to add that "life" is an extremely tricky thing to define. Its one of those things where when you see it, you know that its life. But you can't program a computer to do that. So when looking at other planets we can only take our very best guess as to what it could look like in that environment and put those tests on what we send. However when weight is at a premium its hard to justify wasting it on a guess.

Look at it this way we are still surprising ourselves with what kind and where we are finding life on this planet.

The MER EDL actually went like this: The EDL module with detached from the spacecraft, it used an ablative heat shield to aero-brake, then a super-sonic parachute deployed and slowed it down further, then the heat shield was detached, and the inner module containing the rover and a number of rockets detached and used powered flight to further slow down until it was nearly to the ground and hovering. Then the rockets turned off and the airbags deployed and it dropped the last few meters. This of course all had to be completely automated because of the light-speed delay to Mars.

MER never "hovered". It used braking rockets (located in the aeroshell) while under the chute to cancel out most of its vertical (and some of the horizontal) velocity before dropping the airbag, but that's all. It was unguided all the way down, while Curiosity flew a guided powered descent with precision control of altitude, descent rate, and attitude.

Please put a microscope on the rover! Find some wet sand or water/frost just under the surface, and stick it under the microscope at >0C temperature and see if you spot microbial life. Let's settle this once and for all.

Curiosity already has a microscope. It's called MAHLI and has a max resolution of 15 um/pixel. That's pretty close to being able to see a wide variety of (earth) bacteria.

Except if you scooped up some moist soil on earth, where you know for a fact that there's billions of bacteria, you wouldn't see any when you slapped it on your slide. You'd just see dirt.

Everey mission since the MERs, including Phoenix, has had at least one microscope. Curiosity has a couple, IIRC.

But the meain purpose is precisely to look at dirt. It is mainly a geological tool.

To look for extant life, you would like something like an RNA-Seq. (Can pick out just one of the very many RNA molecules a cell has and enhance it like many DNA-sequencers.)

Let's go slow -- we're still figuring out if it's even possible that Mars could have had microbial life in the distant past.

Exactly correct. The established habitability was ~ 4 billion years ago. We have located fossils on Earth from that time (trace fossils actually), but it took many geologists and paleontologists many years to find the right locales. Granted, Mars isn't quite as transformed as Earth is, so it should be somewhat easier.

That this rover will find something fossil is unlikely however. It will take 10s or more rovers to do the necessary work. If it is doable, they have after all just started to explore if robots can replace field workers at all for this type of work. Realistically, at the current rate it may take centuries to settle the question one way or another.

But if Mars was once surface habitable and evolved life, it could still maintain a biosphere in crustal refugia. If the water zone isn't deep frozen it will have a large main potential biosphere volume, else it will be a thin one between ice and crust on both sides of the permafrost.

ExoMars will try to drill beneath the sterile surface layer. It has already been floated that "Cat" (Curiosity killed the Cat, but luckily the rover had 9 lives =D), which lacks a deep drill, will instead land in a newly excavated crater to look for trace fossil organics.

This rover will have the science greatest value by doing the first Sample Return, but it may just get lucky on its own. I think the value of the rest of the mission is mainly as a manned exploration preparatory platform, but of course all the science it can do will be valuable in some way or other.